The Otter
I went back to camp that night without fish. We visited the pool later, several times, but never got a rise and never saw another trout in that hole. The otter had made a perfect and complete job of it. There was not left even a pair of trout for seed.
A TWENTY inch pickerel of my acquaintance, one day swallowed his grandson. This was an exhibition of bad judgment on the part of Grandad Pickerel. The mere fact of killing his near relative was not in itself reprehensible, since, if all pickerel were not cannibals they would soon exterminate from streams, ponds, and lakes, fishes of all other species. But this particular "pick" was a husky youngster, and while he might very properly have been bitten in half, or have been chewed up into small pieces, the older fish got himself into trouble when he swallowed the kid whole.
A few hours after the occurrence mentioned above, the elder pickerel, at one end of a trolling line, climbed into our boat; Bige, who had the other end of the line, assisting him aboard.
"Sufferin' Mackerel! Well by Gosh!! He's got a rudder on both ends; he can swim both ways without turning around, like a ferry boat," commented Bige, as we examined the floundering big fish, which had the tail end of a smaller fish protruding three inches beyond his snout, while the head of the younger was in the pit of the stomach of the elder pickerel.
The Pickerel with two rudders
I have heard and read many tales, illustrating the voracious appetite of pickerel. Boardman in his book, "Lovers of the Woods," tells how his guide, George, while fishing in Long Lake, lost his Waterbury watch overboard. Several days later, he caught a big pickerel and in dressing it found his watch inside, still running. It seems that a leather thong attached to the watch was wrapped around the winding crown and the other end of the thong was looped over the fish's lower jaw and hooked onto his teeth, so that whenever the pickerel opened and closed his mouth the watch was wound half a turn, and thus was kept running.
Not being an eye-witness, my testimony regarding this incident would not be accepted in a court of law. However, I have known pickerel to swallow frogs, crawfish, mice, sunfish and yellow perch with their prickly dorsal fins, young shell-drakes and gulls, and even bull-heads having three rigid horns with needle points projecting at right angles to the body, any one of which horns, it would seem, might pierce the anatomy of the pickerel. Somehow, they appear to get away with all these things, and more.